Biologist makes cheese from her own tongue microbes

This article was taken from the June 2014 issue
of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print
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American biologist Christina
Agapakis has cultured her own body bacteria into a series of
100 living
"exposures" in Petri dishes. She's also made art from the
salt-loving microbes of the Salton Sea and, most famously, used
author Michael Pollan's belly-button microbes to make cheese. It's
all part of the 29-year-old synthetic biologist's ambitious plan to
blur the lines separating science, art and design, thus changing
our relationship with the microbial world.

"I think we're at an existential crisis point with bacteria,"
says Agapakis. "They are both probiotics that can cure all diseases
and dangerous invisible pathogens that can kill us with the
slightest provocation." The scientist first began to cross over
into art in 2010 while a graduate student at Harvard, where she
collaborated with Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian scent-artist studying
how we interact with the world through our sense of smell. At the
time, Tolaas was studying body odour, which they soon realised
included some of the same bacteria used to make Swiss cheese.
Interested in this overlap, they decided to make their own cheese
out of human bacterial cargo -- swabbed from human navels, armpits,
mouths and toes. The result, exhibited last year at the Science
Gallery in Dublin, left viewers squirming. "The feelings that
people get are important when we're talking about the cultural
dimension of biotechnology," says Agapakis, now researching
bacterial communities at UCLA.

Her other projects include an exhibition of a new work this
month, assembling a "microbial
biogeography of California" out of dirt samples taken along the
5,000-kilometre Pacific Crest Trail. Next up, Agapakis is
writing a book chronicling our historical and future
relationships with bacteria. In the book, Agapakis imagines a time
in which we'll interact with bacteria more closely than we do now.
But first, she says, "We'll have to get over our fear of germs and
redefine what it means to be 'clean'."